Findings are a game changer for future forecasts about thawing continent

Irvine, Calif. – Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves, not icebergs calving into the sea, are responsible for most of the continent’s ice loss, a study by UC Irvine and others has found.

The first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves discovered that basal melt, or ice dissolving from underneath, accounted for 55 percent of shelf loss from 2003 to 2008 – a rate much higher than previously thought. Ice shelves, floating extensions of glaciers, fringe 75 percent of the vast, frozen continent.

The findings, to be published in the June 14 issue of Science, will help scientists improve projections of how Antarctica, which holds about 60 percent of the planet’s freshwater locked in its massive ice sheet, will respond to a warming ocean and contribute to sea level rise.

It turns out that the tug of seawaters just above the freezing point matters more than the breaking off of bergs.

“We find that iceberg calving is not the dominant process of ice removal. In fact, ice shelves mostly melt from the bottom before they even form icebergs,” said lead author Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine professor who’s also a researcher with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “This has profound implications for our understanding of interactions between Antarctica and climate change. It basically puts the Southern Ocean up front as the most significant control on the evolution of the polar ice sheet.”

Ice shelves grow through a combination of land ice flowing to the sea and snow falling on their surfaces. The researchers combined a regional snow accumulation model and a new map of Antarctica’s bedrock with ice shelf thickness, elevation and velocity data captured by Operation IceBridge – an ongoing NASA aerial survey of Greenland and the South Pole. (Rignot will host a planning session of Operation IceBridge scientists at UC Irvine on June 17 and 18.)

Ocean melting is distributed unevenly around the continent. The three giant ice shelves of Ross, Filchner and Ronne, which make up two-thirds of Antarctica’s ice shelves, accounted for only 15 percent. Meanwhile, less than a dozen small ice shelves floating on relatively warm waters produced half the total meltwater during the same period.

The researchers also compared the rates at which the ice shelves are shedding ice with the speed at which the continent itself is losing mass and found that, on average, the shelves lost mass twice as fast as the Antarctic ice sheet did.

“Ice shelf melt can be compensated by ice flow from the continent,” Rignot said. “But in a number of places around Antarctica, they are melting too fast, and as a consequence, glaciers and the entire continent are changing.”

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Other authors are Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl of UC Irvine and Stanley Jacobs of Columbia University. Funding was provided by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

The researchers combined a regional snow accumulation model and a new map of Antarctica’s bedrock with ice shelf thickness, elevation and velocity data captured by Operation IceBridge – an ongoing NASA aerial survey of Greenland and the South Pole.
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snow accumulation MODEL …. lost me right there….what’s so difficult about taking direct measurements? (OK,it’s cold, but someone’s got to do it….).
Makes me think of the 50s and 60s….ooooohhh, the electronic brain said xyz … so it MUST be true…

Questionable data merged with (possibly) good data is still bad, or at the least, questionable.
Why is it when they shake trees in the science buildings/areas, only liberal arts majors fall out?
(Nothing against liberal arts, but there seems to be a distinct lack of reasonableness-checking along with the scientifiic method being left at home…..

So, just how much warmer is that ocean water supposed to be? Compare, for example, the temperature of water in – 1995, then again under the same ice area at the same time of year, in 2005 and 2013.

Read again the “rules” of what they “found” in this so-called study. The increased ice loss is said to be under the small ice shelves, not the 3 big ones.

Snow fall (and inland ice movement) are the sources of ice shelf mass? Didn’t these guys read about the Antarctic continent area is the driest in the world, with only a few cm of total precipitation a year? Where is this snow fall they claim?

Honestly, this is getting ridiculous. “Ice is melting too fast”. Too fast for what? How can someone draw valid conclusions about the entire complex system by short term observations?

Why do people instantly conclude that because something is happening it has to be unusual, unprecedented, bad, harmful, dangerous, or anthropogenic? Why??? Is it really so difficult to see how this is the result of brainwashing?

Ocean circulation is NOT stable and eternal. Ocean streams and flows are just as varying and chaotic as atmospheric weather patterns. There happens to be a flow that’s bringing equatorial waters to an area that they don’t always go. BIG DEAL. If this is actually a cause for concern to you, you should be seeking competent medical help. I understand there are promising therapies to handle your panic attacks using SSRIs, coupled with some knowledge.

It’s interesting, and worth documenting, in fact it’s fascinating to watch the planetary thermal equilibrium system at work, but it’s definitely not something to be alarmed about.

Most probably natural warming being taken up by natural melting, both in the arctic and the Antarctic. But warming nonetheless. It is still interesting to wonder what is causing the system to warm a little, or at least retain a little more heat. And interesting too to wonder what might it might be like if most of the sea ice where no longer available to take up the additional heat from the oceans, as may well have been the case 9,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum, (when sea levels round here appear to have been some two to four metres higher than at present, judging by the raised beaches, erosional cliff notches and inland strand lines it left along my bit of coastline, just down from my house).

There is another potential game changer that went off earlier today. Several days ago, I had noted that 3 Aleutian/Alaska volcanoes were in different stages of eruption or pre-eruption. The Veniaminof volcano went off today and it,s plume is on a heading SSE. If the eruption continues and holds this heading, then it will be blowing a cover over the primary warm spot, +3.83, that is sitting in the North Pacific. Here is a link to a look at the activity….http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2013/06/14/veniaminof/.

As I recall, Tilsdale has provided explanations of the warm currents hitting a portion of the Antarctic where ice melt is occurring. The area is actually disjointed from the continent.
Those who mention Trenberth have misunderstood his whole schemata – the warm ocean water is DEEP, not anywhere near the surface melting any ice.

This reminds me of all the hue and cry over the Greenland melting. Yet if you look at the daily or weekly sst info over the last 6 months, much of Greenland had been surrounded for most of that time. Then over the last several months a cold flow has become dominant and warm waters have been mostly driven away from Greenland. That ‘accelerated’ glacier melt is likely to come to a stop soon.

arthur4563 says:
June 13, 2013 at 6:44 pm
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That would be the West Antarctic Peninsula, which is the northernmost spot of the Antarctic continent. It still shows slightly warm, but only at the northern top of the peninsula. The entire continent, except for that portion, is surrounded by slightly cool water at this time. I read recently that there has been record cold or close to record cold down there in some spots, in the last 2 weeks.

Honestly, this is getting ridiculous. “Ice is melting too fast”. Too fast for what? How can someone draw valid conclusions about the entire complex system by short term observations?
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Code Tech has the prime response “Too fast for what?”.

Since Antarctica is gaining land ice overall you can only wonder what “the speed at which the continent itself is losing mass ” is supposed to mean. I suppose their paper was already in before the following referenced paper was published. The contradictions in climate science continue unabated.

Many of us have been saying what this article says for several years now: changing ocean currents, storms, water temperature, winds, and other external influences cause changes in polar ice cover. Nothing in the climate remains static for long.

Global CO2 has nothing to do with polar ice — or else Antarctica would also be losing ice mass. Instead, Antarctica is setting a new record for ice cover every year.

Arctic ice loss was the last twig the alarmist crowd was clinging to like a drowning man. Now that twig has become waterlogged; the last failed prediction of the CAGW crowd.

Alarmists have now been proven wrong about everything. At what point do they admit that their runaway global warming conjecture has been falsified? Or are they such religious True Believers that, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, they will never admit that they were ever wrong?

The main problem with the article are “value statements” like the following, ““But in a number of places around Antarctica, they are melting too fast, ….”

Why is it too fast? Does it even mean anything that the ice melts faster in one area for a number of years due to a warm current? Is this a periodic cycle where the ice declines in one area for a period of time and then usually grows for a period of time? Overall, the Antarctic has been growing recently. In areas that the Antarctic is growing, would this author also write it is growing too fast at those areas?

As was mentioned in the prior comment, from the joannenova.com.au report on the Antarctic show that the continent changes all the time.

The writing of these authors is unscientific and more suited to an editorial than a science paper.

The Earth is merely getting rid of some the millions of quadrillions of BTUs stored in the oceans and the atmoshpere. This is accomplished through ocean evaporation, cloud formation which blocks solar radiation, altocumulus cloud formation which dumps copious amout of heat out to space, converts thermal energy into kinetic energy in the form of wind, lifting GIGATONS of water kilometers into the air and moving over 300,000,000 cubic miles of ocean water with ocean currents, melting polar ice, etc….

So what?

Earth’s climate is a chaotic, nonlinear, diffuse, decoupled, majestic and often terrifying process that isn’t dictated by the addition of a few hundred ppm of CO2.

Sure, from the empirical evidence to date, CO2 may: increase atmospheric temperatures by 1C/doubling, generate more rain, increase farmland by a few million KM^2 in northern latitudes, and increase crop yields by 50%/doubling, but again, so what? Aren’t all these climate changes net benefits to humanity?

Neither Steig nor O’Donnell discussed ice shelves or land ice, so I’m not sure why that work is part of this discussion. O’Donnell et al criticised Steig and found that Antarctica was warming, but not as much.

Of course, it is not axiomatic that because their results show less warming, their approach was better. Both results confirm warming land-surface temps over the Antarctic, so we can say that much with appropriate caveats.

As the researchers cited above talk about fast melting of the ice shelves, and the changing of the continental ice mass, in what way might this be a “game-changer”? Does giving primacy of cause to basalt melting change projections? Perhaps we’ll be able to discover this when the study comes online, which should be soon.

REPLY: As is typical for you, you are being too literally dense. It applies because AGW zealots and media screamed that because the air temperature on Antarctica was going up, melt would occur, ice shelves would collapse.

For example, here it is claimed that the Larsen B ice shelf collapse due to warming air temperature.

If they can make such comparisons, I can point out that air temperature is not the cause of melting, warm ocean currents are. Tough noogies if you don’t like the comparison, but turnabout is fair play. – Anthony

CodeTech – unless it is all supernatural magic things don’t just change. There has to be a drive of the change, just as there has been in the past and we are experiencing today. Unless you are saying that you believe in magic…

Desert Yote says: “What ever the reason, it has nothing to do with atmospheric CO2. “
It is always interesting to see people who are 100% sure of anything in climate science. Especially when pretty everyone else agrees that CO2 has some effect on the global temperatures.

James, the research is about ice-shelves, not sea ice. The cryosphere data doesn’t apply.
REPLY: As is typical for you, you are being too literally dense. It applies because AGW zealots and media screamed that because the air temperature on Antarctica was going up, melt would occur, ice shelves would collapse.

For example, here it is claimed that the Larsen B ice shelf collapse due to warming air temperature.

If they can make such comparisons, I can point out that air temperature is not the cause of melting, warm ocean currents are. Tough noogies if you don’t like the comparison, but turnabout is fair play. – Anthony

Isn’t this the ultimate result of the processes Bob Tisdale and Willis Eschenbach have discussed here lately: heat from the equatorial Pacific Ocean being distributed to the poles through the action of the Nino-Nina cycle? We see high melting at both poles, but as a result of, among other things, warm water intruding into the ice-covered regions.

Great shuttle photo! It’s not until you see it there, amongst the familiar clutter of a main street, that you realise just what an incredible beast it was, to be hurtling in through the upper atmosphere at re-entry speed, practically on fire from the friction, and then coast into land, unaided on a runway. Just looking at it makes you realise the risk. A long way from flint arrowheads and animal hides that species..

Correct me if I am wrong Janice, but my information is that there is clear evidence from satellite radar altimetry that there has been a very small but measurable increase in overall global sea level, which is probably indicative of additional heat within the system (giving rise to both slight thermal expansion of the oceans and some net addition of melt-water from land-based ice).

I don’t think there is any dispute over that. The Earth’s climate is not a closed system. At times there is more heat coming into it from the sun than at others, and at times there is also more heat retained by the system relative to that lost to space than at others. Hence constant natural climate change, ice ages, inter-glacial warm periods (including the current one, which was initially notably warmer than the present) and corresponding rises and falls in sea levels.

The only dispute is over the cause of the present slight warming. Is it entirely natural? Or is it in part something that we have inadvertantly caused, (e.g. by mass deforestation, industrial and domestic thermal emissions or by adding a small fraction to the concentration of some atmospheric gases)?

Lots of people on either side of the controversy are convinced that they are know and are right, and some get very hot-blooded about it. As far as I am concerned the jury is still out, and probably will be for a very long time. But if I was to make a guess, as a geologist I would guess that most of it is natural. Which is not to say that the ultimate result, one way or the other, mightn’t get a bit uncomfortable. But I’d rather be able to grow mangoes in my mum’s backyard in London than have to go looking for the remains of the house under several hundred metres of ice.

I don’t see a word about the chain of underwater volcanoes that line the vicinity of the ONLY stretch of Antarctic sea ice extent that is contracting and which have been particularly active in recent years. According to the satellites, overall Antarctic sea ice extent is growing and has been for some 40 years. As to the claim that overall “mass” is declining, I don’t recall any data showing what Antarctic ice mass has ever been in the past. Declining from what?

Desert Yote says: “What ever the reason, it has nothing to do with atmospheric CO2. “
It is always interesting to see people who are 100% sure of anything in climate science. Especially when pretty everyone else agrees that CO2 has some effect on the global temperatures.

“That would be like towing a semi-trailer with a moped.”
Or like towing a space shuttle with a pickup truck.
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Yes, the 170,000 lb Space Shuttle is well within the towing capacity of that truck which was designed to tow. Your point?

As is typical for you, you are being too literally dense…. Tough noogies if you don’t like the comparison, but turnabout is fair play.

I would call it simple accuracy, or comparing apples with apples. The Cryosphere Today data is about sea ice, not ice shelves.There was no ‘comparison’ made, it was a simple mistake on the part of the poster. If someone wants to tie together these different components in scientific terms, then there is nothing to stop them. I simply pointed out that it was a different metric to the research. Isn’t it important to be accurate?

I can point out that air temperature is not the cause of melting, warm ocean currents are.

From the news article, it seems that primacy of cause has shifted to ocean warming, rather than air temps dismissed entirely. We’ll have to wait and see when the study comes out, otherwise we are at risk of overinterpreting the media release.

So Antarctic ice mass is decreasing, and the major contributor is warmer-than-before water circulating around it. Kevin Trenberth’s “missing heat” is melting the Antarctic ice (latent heat) instead of warming the surface and lower troposphere.

Well, pending confirmation that the Antarctic ice actually is melting (ice extent is increasing, but that isn’t perfectly proportional to mass), and assuming that the energy of the melt really does match the missing heat. The results, as reported here, do not contradict the main claim that increased CO2 is causing increased heat retention in the climate.

The first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves discovered that basal melt, or ice dissolving from underneath, accounted for 55 percent of shelf loss from 2003 to 2008 – a rate much higher than previously thought.

Perhaps the other 45% of shelf loss is air temp related? We won’t know until the paper comes out.

It should go without saying that this is just one paper, and should not be hailed as definitive.

REPLY: “Perhaps the other 45% of shelf loss is air temp related?” Oh please, perhaps fairies are using the ice in flavored drinks. Just as plausible. This is one of the those moments I’m pretty sure you are just an SkS shill (since you live in Australia), and that you don’t understand how ocean-air interaction works. The peninsula has warmer air temperatures partly because of the warmer ocean currents, partly because of waster heat from the camps where the temperature is measured, something we covered in previous essay here at WUWT. Take a troll time out. – Anthony

We know a lot ice has been lost from the Larsen A, B & C ice shelves, but all 3 are surrounded by sea ice that doesn’t melt in the SH summer. I find warmer air and warmer water unsatisfactory explanations (with a couple of specific exceptions covered below), because why aren’t they also melting the much thinner sea ice?

I can think of 3 reasons for the Larsen ice shelf melt

1. Increased Foehn winds, which have their greatest effect close to shore where the ice shelves are.

3. Increased warm water upwelling near the coast, and hence under the ice shelves. I don’t think this likely for a couple of reasons. Mainly, the sea ice close to shore between the ice shelves isn’t melting.

I think 2 is the likeliest, and essentially the same phenomena, embedded black carbon is melting the Arctic sea ice.

The article is about floating ice shelves melting from underneath. Melting of floating ice should have only a minor effect on sea level. Fill a glass with ice cubes. Add water to the brim. Some will float. Does the water overflow when the ice cubes melt?

Trenberth’s heat is tied up in at least two missing variables, no worries.
And on that note, 60 percent of the Earth’s freshwater tied up in glaciers, wow, think about how many fracking wells that could facilitate or how many water bottles that would be…Makes my brown eyes turn green.

Hey, Larry Kirk, #[:)] (I was going to let you remain anonymous; thought you’d written a little more ambiguously than you intended and didn’t want to make a big deal about it). Well, good for you to step right up and own your own statement.

Apparently, the warming of the system remark was about rising sea levels and I misunderstood you.

(BTW, I have not seen any evidence of an overall, globally manifested, rise in sea level.)

Good luck with those mangoes! (hope it is, indeed, warm enough)

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@ Kajajuk — LOL. This site is fun. Apparently, in your part of the world, “Duh” is pronounced (and written: “Dah.” [or did you accidentally omit the “Ta?”]

In the U.S., “Duh” = well, that was obvious…

and “Dah” (usually with a few “aaa’s” added) would be used to make someone sound just plain stupid, e.g., “I’ve been to…. daaah…. 57 states… not …. uh… daaaaah… counting Alaska and Hawaii…. .” I WONDER WHO SAID THIS IN 2008? #[:)]

Richard Hill says:
June 13, 2013 at 11:04 pm
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Interesting analogy, perhaps it could be improved with ice cube frozen to the lip of the glass and a 1,000 cubes adjacent to the ‘shelf’ cube; then the first cube melts as more cubes are added to the stack…

The article is about floating ice shelves melting from underneath. Melting of floating ice should have only a minor effect on sea level.

Yes. But ice shelves also impede the flow of land-based ice (they are extensions of land-based ice over the water), so as they disintegrate, more ice can flow off the continent, a point that the researchers make.

I agree – although the CAGW climate boys would rather us consider the Earth as a closed system in order to point the finger at evil CO2. The long and short of it, is that the Earth is ‘isolated’ but not ‘closed’ with respect to fixed input and output of radiative energy. The minute but long term changes in incoming OR outgoing energy are what cause the major climate changes and that must certainly be considered as a ‘natural’ process.
Add in the undoubted time lag that it takes for such changes to affect the biosphere (how long at an extra 1 w/m2 would it take to heat up the ocean, even half a degree, a bloody long time, I’ll wager!) and it as clear as the nose on ones face that there is virtually no way to correlate any current measurements to recent changes. How long does it take for deep ocean water to circulate? we can only guess, but again, it will be a long long time. I find it simply amazing that these basic premises of time lags between cause and effect are absent in the majority of climate related publications.
Folk mention scale issues (moped and space shuttle, etc) but that’s just peanuts to the time it takes to warm an ocean IMHO ! A more accurate analogy might be trying to move/pull saturn using a moped! So, even though we ‘think’ we have warmer oceans based on our very limited temporal observations, we don’t see the moped – or at least the climate boys keep inventing it – CO2, AGW, etc.

So they might try looking at the idea that the heat source is localised there and spreads, as can be seen in the NASA sea area anomaly maps perfectly clearly, about twenty five years after they were told to . Those who tried to investigate got a quick kick out the door when it came to funding given the power of the AGW lobby.

If I recall correctly therer are a plethora of volcanic hot water vents in that area (below) which was maintained heated up the water temps therel BTW Steig and Nature should be shut down. They are a disgrace to Science (well, at least all the climate editors need to be fired from Nature)

It is virtually impossible to measure snowfall in Antarctica for several reasons. Firstly a blizzard is not falling snow it is blown snow. I have observed gales on the polar plateau where the blown snow was over 1000 m high with no cloud and blue sky above. The snow gauge in the Wright Valley measured 5mm water equivalent for the 12 months from Dec 1884 to Dec 1985 but was this snow blown off the Plateau or actual fallen snow ?
After the sea ice in McMurdo Sound broke out we had a lot of low cloud coming up the dry valleys every day, where the cloud touched the mountains it left snow behind. Only once in 4 months did we get any falling snow at Vanda Station (30 km inland) and that had totally ablated within a couple of hours of the snowfall stopping. The humidity in the valley before the sea ice broke out was about 7% after the break out it rose to 50 to 80 % during the day if I recall correctly.
Conclusion – most snow that accumulates in Antarctica is by accretion from water vapour in the air, not by snowfall.
The temperature of the water under the sea ice was -1.96°C which is the freezing point of sea water down there. As the water is in contact with huge amounts of ice that is not surprising. New winter ice freezes best if there are no storms while it is forming, then it remains clear and can radiate heat from the water beneath to space. If it gets covered with snow (snow does occur in coastal regions) or broken up by wave action, then it reflects a lot of heat back to the ocean rather than radiate it to space so the ice formed is not at thick as that formed without snow or wave action. Hope that info is useful to somebody.

I’m a bit of an Antarctic watcher, living in Australia we feel its extensive influence right up into the sub tropics and sometimes further. For anyone interested the University of Wisconsin has a great satellite composite of the complexities of the weather systems that traverse the Southern Ocean, and Meteoexploration.com (map room) offer current, temp, humidity, cloud, wind and pressure data.
I’d just like to make a couple of points: firstly anyone who believes that rising air temps are melting the Continental ice clearly doesn’t check the 2m temperatures very often because the vast majority of the area never even gets close to zero let alone above zero. And secondly, the ‘bit that sticks out towards South America’ i.e. the only bit where there is any melting is clearly exposed to ocean currents.
But what I find really awesome is the vast reservoir of ice and the ‘robust’ ice formation that takes place there each winter, it would appear that there’s more than enough ‘cold’ down there to ‘catastrophically’ chill the entire planet several times over.
As we speak there is a big chunk of Antarctica where the 2m temperature is minus 55 C…and the temperature at 10,000m is minus 60 C, now that’s what I CALL and adiabatic lapse rate!
Time to throw another log on the fire.

The various alarmists asking innocently here what makes the waters warm, implying that it can only be their beloved CO2, should take notice of their hero Kevin Trenberth who openly admits that he doesn’t know why.
“Sensitivity experiments illustrate that surface wind variability is largely responsible for the changing ocean heat vertical distribution.”http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/abstract
In the paper he admits that he doesn’t have the faintest clue about how THE WIND transports heat into the depths of the oceans.

We can therefore say that Trenberth does not have a theory, he has conjecture; because for a theory, a physical mechanism must exist. Trenberth does not propose one.

To the various alarmists again: CO2 LWIR does not penetrate water beyond the skin layer.

…Here we show that accelerated basal melting of Antarctic ice shelves is likely to have contributed significantly to sea-ice expansion. Specifically, we present observations indicating that melt water from Antarctica’s ice shelves accumulates in a cool and fresh surface layer that shields the surface ocean from the warmer deeper waters that are melting the ice shelves. Simulating these processes in a coupled climate model we find that cool and fresh surface water from ice-shelf melt indeed leads to expanding sea ice in austral autumn and winter….http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1767

More models for ya. Why can’t they go there and measure, observe, etc.?

CodeTech – unless it is all supernatural magic things don’t just change. There has to be a drive of the change, just as there has been in the past and we are experiencing today. Unless you are saying that you believe in magic…

Which is, of course, a typically logic-challenged warmist response.

Almost every day the wind blows from a different direction. However, for the most part we get our weather from the west. This year, there have been far more weather systems rolling in from the east, which – although unusual – is not “change”. A quick look at the satellite animations shows the spiraling systems that are doing this, and it’s not a big deal. Overall the air is flowing west to east.

The biggest logic-fault of the science distorter is his apparent belief that because something is different than “usual”, it must therefore be a change. And, just like reduced Arctic sea ice, although the numbers might be different from “usual”, it is not a change. And basing the baseline from a point when we KNOW there was unusual coolness is still a ridiculous way to run a “science” endeavor. If the goal was to document actual sea ice extent, each and every year from first accurate records, up to and including last year would be part of the “average”. Then, after waiting for a full climate cycle (not 30, but 60 or so years), a meaningful sea ice extent “average” could be determined. Until that happens there is absolutely NO reason to worry in any way about sea ice extents, either Arctic or Antarctic.

Weather and the ocean are in a constant state of change around this planet, especially as you get farther from the equator. This is because the “goal” of the atmosphere and oceans (yes, that anthropomorphizes them, but hey) is to move heat from where the sun always hits to where the sun rarely hits. The reason we have ocean currents and jet streams and tornadoes and every other form of moving gases and fluids is to get heat energy to where it is most effectively removed from the planet. This is why, even if CO2 caused increase heat to be trapped in the atmosphere, it would make no difference.

By the way – letting the warmists define “climate” as a 30 year period is still an absolute travesty and needs to be strongly contested.

Peter Foster says:
June 14, 2013 at 1:08 am
“It is virtually impossible to measure snowfall in Antarctica for several reasons. Firstly a blizzard is not falling snow it is blown snow. I have observed gales on the polar plateau where the blown snow was over 1000 m high with no cloud and blue sky above. The snow gauge in the Wright Valley measured 5mm water equivalent for the 12 months from Dec 1884 to Dec 1985 but was this snow blown off the Plateau or actual fallen snow ?”

It seems the Wright Valley is used as a comparison for the whole of Antarctica. This is a desert and surely can’t be used to describe the whole of Antarctica, otherwise we could describe South America as a desert because the Atacama desert is there?

Interesting comments on the increase in humidity when the ice melts. Logical. Clear ice however does not, I think, allow IR to pass from warm water below to the sky above. Visibly transparent ice is black to infra-red.

The question shouldn’t be where did the warm water come from. It is warmer than the ice, or it would be ice. This is glacial ice extending out into an ocean as has been going on for millions of years. Does the AGW theory hold that the entire Antarctic Ocean should be frozen? This study just found out what every geologist has known since their first year in college. The real question should be – is what is being observed outside natural variability and well understood physical processes?

I think this study is just saying that when ice leaves/melts on Antarctica, more that was believed before comes from melt on the bottom side of floating ice-shelves rather than iceberg calving.

Large depiction here.

It doesn’t say anything about how much ice is accumulating/forming.

A new recent study, which consolidated all the recent estimates using the newest glacial isostatic adjustment algorithms, reduced the ice mass losses on Antarctica by about half. Mass loss was estimated to be between 200 GT/yr (loss) to 100 GT/yr (gain). [ignore the Greenland estimates here, they have not been updated yet].

Two observations: 1) This may also fit in the category of placing heat and melting in places where no one can effectively verify anything, and 2) If they resort to data smearing in the atmospheric temps across a frozen continent, then undershelf observations and data reliability are even worse. Think of the data system first before considering the conclusions.

Am I missing something here? I don’t see any mention of “warmer” water. Just that the melting ice is due to warm water, warm being defined as “just above the freezing point.” It seems this paper is merely discussing the natural processes by which the Antarctic loses ice, and concludes that undercutting by warm water, not warming water, is the primary process with calving being a distant second place.

Has anyone considered the theory that warmed water welling up at the poles is the way things are supposed to happen? Think periodically equatorally recharged and then poleward overturning ocean. If this great conveyor belt ever stops what it does: melting polar ice (IE the belt stops, and equatorial warmed water never rises at the poles to melt ice), the quiet sleeping ocean sends cold dense water to the bottom and warm water to the top to escape Earth. Eventual result: Frozen ball.

Back in the old days of the “sky is falling” AGColding, idiots said that CO2 will stop the conveyor belt and send us into a frozen ball state. Now that the idiots realize the conveyor belt is still working, they are saying that the conveyor belt is still working and we will all fry.

Anyone notice how the MSM reported this? The MSM reports were attrocious in their distortion of these facts. They made it seem like the continential ice was melting from the bottom up when in fact this report addressed shelf ice in a small portion of the Antarctic margin.

Perhaps the answer is quite simple. For 30 years (1976-2006), the Pacific Ocean was dominated by El Nino events. The residual ocean currents in turn saw step increases in their surface level temperatures. I would not be surprised if over time scientists discover long term SST oscillation near the Antarctic which controls sea ice development.

Jimbo – are coverage and total mass the same? And is the ice expanding on both land and sea?

Would a reduction in extent indicate reduced melting? Has mass reduced?

Abstract: 2013
A synthesis of the Antarctic surface mass balance during the last 800 yrGlobal climate models suggest that Antarctic snowfall should increase in a warming climate and mitigate rises in the sea level. Several processes affect surface mass balance (SMB), introducing large uncertainties in past, present and future ice sheet mass balance……….However, a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high SMB coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic ice divide since the 1960s…..http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/303/2013/tc-7-303-2013.html

Abstract: (7 June 2013)
Enhanced snowfall on the East Antarctic ice sheet is projected to significantly mitigate 21st century global sea level rise. In recent years (2009 and 2011), regionally extreme snowfall anomalies in Dronning Maud Land, in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica, have been observed. It has been unclear, however, whether these anomalies can be ascribed to natural decadal variability, or whether they could signal the beginning of a long-term increase of snowfall. Here we use output of a regional atmospheric climate model, evaluated with available firn core records and gravimetry observations, and show that such episodes had not been seen previously in the satellite climate data era (1979)…..http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002/grl.50559

And of course, the ocean is heated locally by submarine volcanoes – particularly off the Antarctic Peninsula and a belt of volcanism dots the entire western Antarctica where all this “alarming” ice loss has been happening (and spread “statistically” across the eastern Antarctica).

Am I missing something here? I don’t see any mention of “warmer” water. Just that the melting ice is due to warm water, warm being defined as “just above the freezing point.” It seems this paper is merely discussing the natural processes by which the Antarctic loses ice, and concludes that undercutting by warm water, not warming water, is the primary process with calving being a distant second place.

The study isn’t out yet (tomorrow), but according to The Australian newspaper, “warming” oceans are responsible for what the researchers describe as ice shelves that are melting too fast to maintain balance.

Calving is the breaking off of the ice shelf, whether from warm basal surface melt. According to the article that sparked this thread, the researchers think basal melt is 55% responsible for the calving.

Too early to draw conclusions, but it seems that in certain areas around the Antarctic, ice shelf melt is occurring faster from warmer waters (and possibly air temps). Perhaps WUWT will update when the paper comes out.

“CodeTech – unless it is all supernatural magic things don’t just change. There has to be a drive of the change, just as there has been in the past and we are experiencing today. Unless you are saying that you believe in magic…”

See, I told you these idjits are a religion. That’s as clear an admission of belief of a static constant unchanging climate as you will get. They believe we were born into a Garden of Eden and humans dared to eat the apple of a non-agrarian lifestyle, tapping the forbidden fruits of fossil fuel and disrupting the natural order given us by their God – Mother Nature.

It never occurs to them that a planet comprised of a molten core surrounded by a viscous mantle with huge continents drifting all around a globe on a tilted axis wobbling its way around a star that serves as primary source of warmth causing chaotic local effects of clouds and precipitation plus infinite other variables, could possibly be driving climate.

No, it was humans, born but a second ago in geological timescale that created our climate, and that is quite a feat indeed. No sir, you EcoNuts are the ones who believe in magic.

In 2011, Zwally and Giovinetto published the paper “Overview and assessment of Antarctic Ice-Sheet mass balance estimates: 1992-2009.” Surveys in Geophysics 32: 351-357. These are two NASA scientists. They examined a number of estimates of ice mass balance
for the Antarctic. They stated that their preferred estimate was -31 Gt/year. Less than 3% of the annual mass input, and about 0.2 mm of “sea-level equivalent” per year. Also, some of the surface mass balance estimates were in fact POSITIVE, including from the EU’s ERS satellite (+28 Gt/year). The very high negative values were from GRACE data, which has been demonstrated to have very high errors.

The fact is, we don’t even know if Antarctica is actually losing ice mass at all, 31 gigatonnes
of ice sounds like a lot, per year–but with ice having a density of 917 kilograms/cubic METER,
it amounts to less than 1 cubic kilometer per year! That’s a pretty finicky estimate for an ice sheet that contains 26.5 million cubic km of ice!

while people are diddling with a degree/century and 2.5mm of sea level rise a year, are they aware that over 50 million cubic kilometres of ice from the last ice age melted and warmed up 17C and raised the oceans over~ 120 metres (400 feet)! This took 20 trillion MJ of heat to do it, enough to bring the top 100m of ocean to the boiling point if the climate had no way to dissipate the heat. Finally, we don’t know how this happened but it sure wasn’t a few 100ppmv of CO2. I hope my calcs of heat are correct after my mini-tirade.

Let’s keep in mind that we aren’t reading the article in Science, we are reading some summary together by someone, presumably at the University, who may or may not fully understand the details.

For example, we know that Antarctica gains ice each winter, and some of it melts each summer. It is an appropriate scientific question to wonder how much of the annual melt is attributable to water, and how much is due to air. One possibility is that the actual article concludes that the proportion is more weighed toward water than previously thought. This is a useful scientific inquiry, and the results may be useful.

I agree that the phrase “speed at which the continent itself is losing mass” leaves the impression that there is a net loss over years, but it may be that this is just a wording accident. Let’s look at the actual article, which is supposed to be available today.

You sound too high to be reasoned with. As usual. You Magic Gas failures are always shocked anyone can be sure of anything – because everything you say gets laughed at until you’re forced to shut your stupidity faucet.

———-
Tim Folkerts says:
June 13, 2013 at 7:54 pm

It is always interesting to see people who are 100% sure of anything in climate science. Especially when pretty everyone else agrees that CO2 has some effect on the global temperatures.

“This is because the “goal” of the atmosphere and oceans (yes, that anthropomorphizes them, but hey) is to…
equilibrate gradients in physical and chemical potentials…that which can never be done until time infinite…so who cares; that is your point? It has all happened before so what?
Ponder your navel never? Plan your garden or grave? Climb a mountain ’cause it is there even though it shall not always be there?
thanks to all u Zen masters?

Air is inefficient at melting ice because the thermal gradient is stacked against the process. Warm air that does succeed at melting ice is cooled by the heat of fusion tax (albeit the wimpier phase change). It is not going anywhere. It stays right there to impede further melting.

Water is efficient at melting ice from underneath because the situation is reversed. Warm water cooled by the fusion tax sinks to be replaced by warmer water to continue the process of melting.

Basically the difference between being on top or underneath, amplified by the greater enthalpy of water.

BTW, if you do the math, the enthalpy of fusion from all the melted ice in the last 35 years is orders of magnitude too small to explain the “missing heat”.

So now the Antarctic melt is caused by warm water and the paper gets a big play. About what? That there is melting under the ice but the Antarctic continent is not melting away as we already knew? I proved two years ago that Arctic warming is caused by warm water carried into the Arctic Ocean by currents and these guys know nothing about it. But they are big climate scientists supported by NASA, NSF, and NOAA who undoubtedly paid millions for this research. I did my work on my pension, proved that Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming, and put it into global climate context. It started at the turn of the twentieth century, prior to which there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling. It paused in mid-century for thirty years, then resumed, and is still going strong. Its cause is probably a rearrangement of the the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century that started to carry warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. The mid-century pause was probably due to a temporary return of the former flow pattern. Direct measurement of current temperature in 2009 showed that its temperature exceeded anything seen in the Arctic within the last two thousand years. We are now in the middle of a global warming standstill (or hiatus or whatever you want) but the Arctic is the exception to the rule. It is the only place in the world that is still warming because it is not warmed by carbon dioxide greenhouse effect but by warm ocean currents carrying that Gulf Stream water north. If you want full details get my paper that is available on Climate etc. blog.

Duh ! Are these chumps really claiming that heat energy would much rather flow from the bottom of the ice to the gazillions of gallons of high specific heat, high thermal conductivity, warmer ocean surface waters, that circulated down there from the tropics; (look up “gulf stream” and “Coriolis force”, and “planetary rotation” in Wikipedia), than take the much more effective escape route through the way less dense, very poor thermal conductivity, low specific heat atmospheric gases above the ice ??

Some people will believe almost anything! And what of the rumor, that the whole South Pacific Ocean, and the whole South Atlantic Ocean, collectively AKA , “The Southern Ocean”, slosh back and forth twice a day in that narrow gap between South America, and the misnamed Antarctic Peninsula, which actually isn’t in the Antarctic. With all that tidal water sloshing back and forth on both sides of the near Antarctic Peninsula, some people might think that it would bulge up under those ice shelves, like a tree root bulging up under the non-pre-stressed concrete, sidewalk/footpath/whatever, until the concrete; excuse me ice shelf breaks. There are rumors, that ice, like non-pre-stressed concrete, has near zero tensile strength, so if you bend it, it breaks by cracking open, on the tensioned upper side of the shelf.

Well, I see it’s the University of California; I think they all just voted themselves a big pay raise. Well maybe that will attract a better class of chumps to the University of California

Several months ago, the University of Kentucky hosted of forum on climate change with three excellent speakers who were all self-described conservatives. Liberals reported how they better understand that there are thoughtful conservative perspectives on, and solutions to, climate change, thus allowing for a broadened public discussion. In turn, conservatives in attendance learned the same thing. You can watch the recording of this event at http://bit.ly/135gvNa. The starting time for each speaker is noted at this page, so you can listen to the speakers of greatest interest to you.